Your brand is not your logo — what an identity system includes
The logo is about 5% of it. Here is the other 95%.
The logo is the smallest part
A logo is a signature. Useful, but it is not what makes a brand recognisable across a website, an Instagram carousel, an invoice and a trade-show banner. Consistency comes from the system around the mark.
Typography carries more brand than colour
One or two typefaces, used with a strict scale and consistent weights, does more for recognition than any palette. Decide the display face, the body face, the weights permitted for each role, and the minimum sizes. Then stop adding faces.
Colour with roles, not just swatches
A palette needs semantics: which colour is a primary action, which is a surface, which is an accent used sparingly for identity moments, and which never appears in body text. Without roles, every designer invents their own usage and the brand drifts.
Imagery and illustration direction
Written rules for photography — warm or cool, natural or studio, people or product, how much grain. Plus the treatment for graphics and illustration. This is the layer most brands skip, and it is why their social output looks like a different company to their website.
Voice, and the rules that hold it
Sentence casing, contraction use, whether you address the reader as "you", how you handle numbers and pricing, and words you avoid. Write it with examples of both good and bad. Then package the lot as a living system — see why a design system pays for itself for how the digital half is maintained.
A 30-minute consultation and a written summary of what we would prioritise.
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